Did The Simpsons predict death of Trump? Fact Check

In the aftermath of the news that President Trump and is wife Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19, a rehashed rumour has circulated that claim cartoon The Simpsons predicted Trump’s death in an episode.

A screenshot of a Simpsons version of Donald Trump lying in a coffin with a secret service agent in the foreground is typically used to illustrate the alleged prediction.

FALSE

An example of the claim on social media is below.

The Simpsons has long had a reputation of predicted future events based on the content of its episodes, but as we’ve demonstrated on numerous occasions, this reputation has long been falsified or embellished.

False or misleading claims have previously circulating claiming the long running cartoon had predicted the coronavirus outbreak, the protests following the death of George Floyd, the fire at Notre Dame, Trump riding down an escalator after announcing his presidency and the reported story of Trump attempting to buy Greenland.

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However, The Simpsons never predicted any of those things. In all cases, the reality was one of the following –

1. The images used to prove the prediction were not actually from The Simpsons, instead they were created by people not affiliated with the show.
2. Real screengrabs from scenes in The Simpsons show had been digitally altered by third parties to make it appear like a prediction.
3. The images or videos were actually created after the event in which they are allegedly predicting.

As for The Simpson’s predicting the death of Donald Trump, it is point one from the above list. The scene where Donald Trump is seen lying in a coffin is not from the TV show. The Simpsons has never featured an episode where the death of Trump has been predicted, nor has it featured an episode of Trump lying in a coffin.

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The creator of the image is not known, but in 2017 it has been linked to serial hoax-starting website 4Chan. In fact this particular image has been circulating since around 2017, shortly after Trump took office. It spread again in 2020 with the claim that The Simpsons had predicted Trump’s death on August 27th 2020, but this is also false. It also spread in 2020 in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd as part of another fake prediction claim that The Simpsons has predicted Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests.

It is likely that the creator of the fake image used the below footage of a coffin to create the fake scene.

The Simpsons did, however, predict a President Trump before Trump announced his 2016 candidacy, in an episode titled “Bart to the Future”. In that episode, a character refers to a President Trump, though Trump did not appear as an actual character in the episode. However that “prediction” could be considered less impressive since Trump had at the time publicly mulled over the idea of running for president several times before the episode was created.

As for the claim that The Simpsons predicted the death of Donald Trump, or that he would contract COVID-19, such claims we rank false.